Kali Linux 2018.1 Release

Kali Linux The Pentesting Distro and Hackers and Pentesters Favourite LinuxOperating System has been Rolling Release for quite some time now but few days back Offensive Security ( The Kali Linux Team ) updated the ISO and images. Atough I am quite late in reporting this and many already have got it but still.

Kali Linux 2018.1 has a shiny new 4.14.12 kernel. New kernels always have a lot of new features and the 4.14 kernel is no exception, although two new features really stand out.

AMD Secure Memory Encryption Support – Secure Memory Encryption is a feature that will be in newer AMD processors that enables automatic encryption and decryption of DRAM. The addition of this features means that systems will no longer (in theory) be vulnerable to cold-boot attacks because, even with physical access, the memory will be not be readable.

Increased Memory Limits – Current (and older) 64-bit processors have a limit of 64 TB of physical address space and 256 TB of virtual address space (VAS), which was sufficient for more than a decade but with some server hardware shipping with 64 TB of memory, the limits have been reached. Fortunately, upcoming processors will enable 5-level paging, support for which is included in the 4.14 kernel. In short, this means that these new processors will support 4 PB of physical memory and 128 PB of virtual memory. That’s right, petabytes.

Note that if you haven’t updated your Kaliinstallation in some time (tsk2), you will like receive a GPG error about the repository key being expired (ED444FF07D8D0BF6). Fortunately, this issue is quickly resolved by running the following as root:

For those of you using Hyper-V to run the Kali virtual machines provided by Offensive Security, you will find that the Hyper-V virtual machine is now generation 2, which means it’s now UEFI-based and expanding/shrinking HDD is supported. The Hyper-V integration services are also included, which supports Dynamic Memory, Network Monitoring/Scaling, and Replication.